I am going to be writing a few 2020 summary notes / awards. Today is “the winning themes!” Theme 1: Infrastructure Development Hard assets get a bad reputation in VC. This negative reputation is self-inflicted by the early stage venture community: investing in infrastructure and expecting venture returns. The fact is that there are better …
An important industrial tech M&A event happened earlier this month: PTC acquired Arena Solutions for $715M… marrying PTC’s CAD software with Arena’s Product Lifecycle Management solutions. The Acquirer PTC is a pillar of the industrial technology scene. the company has nearly $1.5 billion in software and related services revenue. The company received a $1 billion …
The “built on Salesforce” technology stack now has a number of winners. The original and most epic example is Veeva Systems. Veeva took less than $10M of capital, and is now a $41BN value company. The company was so efficient because it leverages the Salesforce infrastructure to build a vertical-specific solution. In the process, Veeva’s …
Bille Jean King’s autobiography has that title. If you know anything about her, you know that title fits her story arc perfectly. This phrase is highly relevant for the current sustainable technology environment. Let me break it down: Pressure (Latin: ‘premere’ -> ‘pressura’ meaning “to push”) You are pushing yourself. Pressure can be positive: to …
Until recently, sustainability ideology and capitalism were two circles with only minor overlap in a Venn Diagram. Outside of minor fads, the two groups never saw eye::eye and financial returns were (expected) to be sacrificed for an investment in sustainable advancement. The latest surge of interest in climate solutions, highlighted by: Tesla’s stock surge Array …
I worked with Kevin Stevens at Choose Energy. He is now a Partner at Intelis Capital. According to Kevin’s website, Intelis Capital makes long-term investments in the next generation of energy titans accelerating the widespread adoption of novel technologies creating a more resilient and sustainable energy ecosystem. Kevin recently wrote an excellent post about C3.AI …
Aurora Solar co-founders, Chris Hopper and Sam Adeyemo are ALWAYS heads down. They would be the first to tell you that new financings are mostly a nuisance and the fundraising process gets in the way of growing the business. The cofounders are laser-focused and Aurora Solar has a simple statement: “We are building the operating …
At Energize we are fortunate to see many next-generation technologies. As an investor with a commercial focus, I usually ask the entrepreneur something along the lines of: “what budget or line item at the customer do you think funds this technology purchase?” Less commercially aware CEOs will answer this question by proclaiming of a new …
About a month ago I wrote about how Honeywell is using their Honeywell Connected Enterprise division to go all-in on software solutions. The core product of HCE is Forge, a domain-specific, low-code cloud operating model built to be system and OEM agnostic. The cloud suite simplifies data extraction from assets, people and process and uses …
On Wednesday, Invenergy announced the development of the largest solar farm in America. The solar farm is 1.3 GW, costs $1.6 billion and will employ 600 construction workers. (Invenergy is an anchor Limited Partner in my VC firm, Energize Ventures) The scale of this project is astounding. The largest existing solar development is 650MW, meaning …